Man of Steel to loom over Sheffield

Features editor

We’re generally not very good at celebrating engineering in Britain. That’s been said so often that it’s becoming a cliché, but nevertheless it’s true. You won’t find that many monuments or statues to engineering around, although it’s quite easy to understand why — what’s the point of a statue of Brunel, when you’ve got the Clifton Suspension Bridge? The engineer/architect/mathematician Christopher Wren phrased this attitude better than anyone in his epigram at St Paul’s Cathedral — if you seek his monument, look around you.

However, that attitude might well contribute to the invisibility of engineering in the UK. But in the coming years, just outside Sheffield, that might change.

A CGI version of Man of Steel, 30 high from base to crown

The Sheffield Icon project is aiming to build a colossal statue, the Man of Steel, on a former landfill site overlooking the M1. Acting both as a memorial to the generations of steelworkers who put Sheffield on the map as the birthplace of stainless steel and British industry’s crucible of metalworking, and as a signpost to the new materials technologies which the city’s institutions are developing, the Man of Steel will be 20m high, perching in a rather relaxed pose on top of a 16m column whose outer faces will be cast in a form representing layers of coal. From the base of the column to the top of the head, the statue will be 30m tall and will act as a ‘gateway sculpture in a similar way to the Angel of the North.

The statue is based on a sculpture by former steelworker Steve Mehdi, who is leading the project. ‘It was originally going to be 40m tall,’ he told me, ‘which we thought was big enough to make a statement but not too big. But it’s going to be very near the Kimberworth housing estate, and when Axis Architects started looking at the topology, we reduced the height because of sun patterns and shadowfall which would have reduced the light to people’s houses.’

The idea is for Man of Steel to be privately funded as far as possible. ‘We have tremendous support from the private sector,’ Mehdi said. ‘When we started this project four years ago, we were in a very different economic climate and companies were queuing up to provide funding. Now we’re in a recession, we’re inevitably seeing some companies withdrawing, but other have come in to take their place.’

Full funding is necessary before any work can begin, Mehdi insists — ‘we really can’t end up with something half-finished,’ he said — so over the next 12 months he’ll determine exactly how much the project will cost. At the moment the estimated budget is some £2.7m.

“We’re satisfied that there won’t be any problems with reflections or glare for people on the motorway

Steve Mehdi, project director and sculptor

The project has now passed an important milestone. The site for the sculpture has been secured, donated by FCC Environmental; and earlier this week Rotherham City Council granted planning permission. ‘A lot of the process of building depends on that planning permission, and now we’ve got that, we can sit down and look at funding strategy,’ Mehdi said. ‘If we need funding from the Arts Council, or the Heritage Lottery Fund, or ERDF funding, we’ll look at that.’

At the moment, Mehdi’s industry partners are looking at the engineering and technical requirements. John Halfpenny of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre at Sheffield University is working on a 2m-high model of the sculpture in Modelboard, working on 3D scans of Mehdi’s original bronze sculpture from Sheffield Hallam University, which will be metal-sprayed to give it a stainless steel finish; this will go on display at the Magma Science Centre in Sheffield.

Meanwhile, local firm Newburgh Engineering is producing a 1m high model in stainless steel to test out the build method for the actual sculpture.

The statue will be formed from a steel monocoque onto which stainless steel plates will be attached to form the outer ‘musculature’ of the figure. ‘It’ll be as close as possible to the CGI images we’re using, although some of that will depend on how the steel is fabricated: we could cast, roll or bend it,’ Mehdi said. ‘The finish probably won’t be quite so shiny — we’ve satisfied the Environment Agency and the Highways Agency that there won’t be any problems with reflections or glare for people on the motorway.’

Architects’ drawings of Man of Steel. The figure itself is 20m high, and the 16m column contains a visitors’ centre and observation deck

Engineering contractor Mott McDonald is looking at the supporting column construction; it will sit on 16m piles driven into the site to form the foundation. ‘We’re pretty close to resolving that,’ Mehdi said. ‘The idea is that we’ll have a hollow column that we can fit out, pretty quickly, in a second phase to make a visitor centre.’ The column will also feature an enclosed observation deck at the top floor, though there will be no access inside the statue itself; the shape of the neck would form a bottleneck with safety issues, Mehdi explained.

Of course, any project like this is bound to attract sceptics, and art is a matter of taste. But the Angel of the North, ribbed airliner wings spread over the Gateshead suburbs, has been adopted by the local community. There can be no doubt that Sheffield’s industry deserves a monument — at the moment, the best it’s got is probably The Full Monty. It’s hard to see exactly how Man of Steel is dressed, or undressed, and some wags have commented on local paper websites whether he should be adorned with a flat cap, to make him more Northern, or some goggles and a hardhat, to comply with Health and Safety. But it’s fittingly ambitious, and it’ll definitely have a certain charisma. Maybe there’s room for another statue of the city’s Woman of Steel, Jessica Ennis, while we’re about it.

Hmm. Man of Steel. Links to Stalin; well, that certainly makes a good connection to the communist union wreckers that did so much to ensure we have little steel industry left in the UK.

Seriously, it looks great.

Let’s hope it stays privately funded and doesn’t go into the public sector so the cost can stay at the rather tight sounding £2.7m, and not face the minimum tenfold increase if would face in the public sector.

Steve Mehdi should be applauded for heading this project – a sculpture that is very clear in its meaning as a tribute to the human endeavour that grew the British Steel Industry. A very clear visual reminder to the public about the value of a product that is essential to all of our lives yet has been, and is often taken for granted. Thank you Steve!

How misguided to think that the Unions had anything to do with the demise of the British Steel industry, in Sheffield or elsewhere.
It was entirely due to incompetent management, following a succession of inappropriate useless Chairmen who knew nothing of the Industry.
And as for the much heralded private sector? The whole of the state owned British Steel Industry was sold for around a quarter of it’s value, £4 billion of capital debt wiped off, and the “new” private owners simply ran it into the ground and sold it to a foreign company who are in the process of reducing the capacity even further to switch production to their other overseas works. At the same time, the current owners are borrowing around $5 billion to build new steel works in Brazil.

Decommissioned blast furnace? Not sure if this was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion (I suspect it was). If it wasn’t, I wonder how it could be either repositioned and made self-evidently a sculptural statement or left in the same place and visually transformed. I see nothing wrong with preserving such great items, but to become a sculpture it would have to be changed somehow in appearance. Maybe gilding the exterior? Now, readers will have to decide where my tongue is relative to my cheek. The proposed imagery looks appropriate to me. I doubt if Stalin would have posed in this way, incidentally.

I’m sure it was tongue-in-cheek, but the main problem in moving one is finding one to move, at least in this country.
I uplifted 2 from Holland and rebuilt them in Malaysia. Not too difficult if there are still enough “older” men who know what one looks like.
Incidentally, I was once asked by a group of architects to agree to them giving architectural treatment on a new 10 m blast furnace in North Africa.

It was not tongue in cheek; it was with great sadness and a little shame at the annihilation of steel Industry in this country. Obviously not enough big Bonuses for Bankers.
I do admit the Blast Furness came to mind after seeing that monstrous piece of art, next to the Olympic stadium.

This will be fantastic when complete – it would be great if all the famous artists that have Come from Sheffield could do a fundraiser concert – Definatley go to that ! What about in the Don Valley Stadium or how about selling key rings with the man if Steel on them ! – made in Sheffield of course ! Every Sheffielder will be proud to get behind this !